The invention relates generally to ground working equipment, such as agricultural equipment, and more specifically, to a soil behavior simulator for agricultural implement blades.
It is well known that to attain the best agricultural performance from a piece of land, a farmer must cultivate the soil, typically through a tilling operation. Common tilling operations include plowing, harrowing, and sub-soiling. Modern farmers perform these tilling operations by pulling a tilling implement behind a motorized tractor. Depending on the crop selection and the soil conditions, a farmer may need to perform several tilling operations at different times over a crop cycle to properly cultivate the land to suit the crop choice. In one type of tilling operation, rows of blades are pulled through soil to break up clods or lumps of soil, as well as old plant material to provide a more amenable soil structure for planting and to level the soil surface.
As will be appreciated, a variety of blade configurations may be utilized to effectively till the soil. For example, a particular blade configuration may be selected based on soil composition, soil condition and/or a desired degree of tillage. To test the effectiveness of a blade configuration, the selected blades are attached to an implement, and the implement is pulled through a field. The performance of the blades may be evaluated based on high-speed photography of the resultant soil movement and/or a post-tillage analysis of the soil. Unfortunately, the process of manufacturing a sufficient number of blades for an implement, running the implement through a field, and analyzing the resultant data may be excessively time-consuming, thereby increasing the costs associated with blade development/selection. In addition, once a desirable blade configuration is established/selected, it may be difficult to demonstrate the effectiveness of the blades to consumers. For example, consumers may be unable to witness the blades in operation within a field, and pictures of the blades in operation may not effectively convey the performance to the consumers.